07 November, 2008

TWO SERB COMMANDERS ARRESTED OVER SREBRENICA GENOCIDE

IN CUSTODY: Momir Peles (59) and Slavko Peric (61). They are suspected of taking part in the execution of 1,700 Bosniak civilians and dumping them into Pilica Farm mass grave, see photo below:

PHOTO: Srebrenica genocide mass grave at Pilica farm, twenty feet deep and a hundred feet long, was excavated by forensic pathologists in 1996. Photo by Gilles Peress (from The Graves: Srebrenica and Vukovar [Scalo Books, 1998]). At least 8,372 men, children and elderly were summarily executed and dumped into mass graves during 1995 genocide in Srebrenica. In a U.N. assisted ethnic cleansing, at least 20,000 women were forcibly expelled from the enclave. As the ICTY Judges found (more here), the decision not to kill all women and children may be explained by the Bosnian Serbs’ sensitivity to public opinion.

On November 5th, Bosnian police arrested two Bosnian Serb wartime commanders suspected of taking part in genocide against Bosniaks in Srebrenica in July 1995, a police statement said. The State Protection and Investigative Agency arrested Momir Peles, 59, and Slavko Peric, 61, in the eastern town of Zvornik, where they had served as the Zvornik brigade 1st battalion's deputy commander and an assistant commander.

The Zvornik brigade was one of 13 brigades of the Bosnian Serb army that comprised the Drina corps, commanded by General Radislav Krstic, who was jailed for 35 years by the UN war crimes tribunal in The Hague over the Srebrenica genocide. Peles and Peric were suspected of taking part in the execution of 1,700 Muslims in the village of Pilica, where one of the largest mass graves was found, and at the military cooperative at Branjevo, the prosecutor's office said.

"The suspects will be brought to the Prosecutor's office due to the grounded suspicion that they committed the criminal offence of genocide ... by participating in the apprehension and execution of 1,700 Bosniak men from the Srebrenica enclave," the prosecutor's office said in a statement.

Bosnian Serb forces, commanded by General Ratko Mladic, slaughtered between 8,000 and 10,000 Bosniak men, children and elderly - after the town, which was under the protection of United Nations peacekeepers, fell into their hands in 1995. Most were killed while trying to escape through the woods, either shot down immediately or arrested and brought to warehouses or schools from where they were taken to places of execution, killed and dumped into mass graves.

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Srebrenica Genocide is not a matter of anybody's opinion; it's a judicial fact recognized first by the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia and subsequently by the International Court of Justice.